Yes, We Are Zombies, But We Can Become Conscious!

Charles T. Tart

The Journal of Consciousness Studies Symposium on Todd C. Moody's "Conversations with Zombies"

Introduction by Peter Webster

In seeking to explore the elusive nature of consciousness,
philosophers have sometimes resorted to "thought
experiments," much as physicists do when thinking about
the enigmas of relativity. Todd C. Moody, associate professor
in philosophy at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia,
recently contributed a paper to The Journal of
Consciousness Studies in which he proposed such a
thought experiment. Professor Moody's ideas sparked a lively
debate in the on-line discussion forum of the Journal, and
led to a published Symposium
on the subject of his paper which was entitled, "Conversations with Zombies"
. (JCS,1,
(2), pp. 196-200, available at http://www.zynet.co.uk/imprint)

Moody's thought experiment was an attempt to understand
whether, and perhaps how, consciousness might be a phenomenon
independent from or non-essential to the processes of the
nervous system and associated behavior. Would it be possible
that a computer, or some hypothetical being, might have all
the behavioral attributes and powers of a conscious human yet
lack the self-awareness, and awareness of awareness that we
call consciousness? In sum, Moody proposed at least the
theoretical and philosophical existence of
"zombies," beings behaviorally identical to humans,
yet lacking consciousness.

One of the contributors to the Symposium, Charles T.
Tart, submitted a short commentary inspired by ideas often
expressed in Sufism, Zen, or other Eastern philosophies: that
most human beings are, most of the time, not at all fully
conscious, and require techniques such as meditation to
awaken them from that functional but often profoundly
unsatisfying state of normal everyday awareness. Professor
Tart has written extensively on such subjects as meditation,
hypnosis, dreams, and the use of psychedelics in the
production of Altered States of Consciousness, (the
title of one of his books). His contribution to The
Journal of Consciousness Studies Symposium is reproduced
here with the permission of the publisher, Keith Sutherland (Imprint Academic).

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (4), 1995, pp.
361-5

YES, WE ARE ZOMBIES, BUT WE CAN BECOME CONSCIOUS!

Observations on Moody's 'Conversations with Zombies'

Moody (1994) ends his provocative article on 'Conversations
with zombies' by raising the possibility that 'We might, after
all, be zombies'. By zombies he means creatures who appear to act
intelligently, like us, but who have no internal experience of
consciousness. My basic point in this brief commentary will be to
note as a basic observation that we are indeed, as a matter of
verifiable fact, like zombies most of the time but we have
a possibility of becoming conscious. The consequences of this
observable and testable reality are of enormous importance for
the development of a fuller understanding of consciousness and
its possibilities.

The approach I take here is empirical and
scientific, rather than philosophical. By 'science' I mean an
approach to understanding all of reality that puts
absolute and primary emphasis on observables, whether these
observables are external or internal to the observer, and
secondary emphasis on conceptual understanding. That is, creating
an elegant and logical understanding of something, a theory, is
fine, but if that understanding does not account for all
of the relevant observations, both postdictively and
predictively, that's too bad for the theory, not the
observations. My understanding of scientific method, and some
important aspects of its application to the investigation of
altered states of consciousness, has been described in detail
elsewhere (Tart, 1972). This approach is hardly unique to me:
except for the observation of how many 'scientists' there seem to
be who subrate or refuse to look at data which does not accord
with their theoretical convictions, I had always thought this was
the generally agreed-upon definition of what constituted science.

To illustrate this primacy of observation: at
the beginning of my career, as a graduate student, I began
extensive research on the effects of post-hypnotic suggestions on
nocturnal dreaming (Tart, 1962; 1963). In the course of reviewing
the literature, I came across a monograph by a philosopher
(Malcolm, 1959) which logically and conclusively proved that
there were no such things as dreams: I had nightmares about it
all that night! Since then I have come to realize that one can
probably build a convincing and 'logical' case for almost
anything, especially if the conclusions appeal to one's hidden
prejudices. Thus I seldom pay much attention to arguments about
consciousness unless they work intimately and usefully with the full
range of relevant observables.

Zombies

Moody notes that

Zombies are, in relation to us, in the same predicament
that most of us are in relation to those mystics who report
back to us their experiences of what is sometimes called
superconsciousness. We can ape what they say if we want to,
but we don't really know what we are talking about. This
difficulty is sometimes referred to in the mystical
literature as 'ineffability', but the mystics understand each
other, just as human non-zombies do. (p. 200.)

I would describe myself as an empiricist and
scientist and a very practical person, not the kind of person we
popularly associate with the term 'mystic'. I do not feel I am in
some special relation to a Higher Power or God, am not subject to
sudden states of ecstasy, and do not have any special, 'holy'
doctrine to defend. But as a result of more than 30 years of
observations, both external and internal, I would like to report
that:

 Ordinary, 'normal' consciousness is indeed a
zombie-like state of greatly constricted and distorted, if
not absent, 'consciousness'. I have given such ordinary
consciousness the technical name of 'consensus consciousness'
in the purely descriptive sense and 'consensus trance' when
focusing on it as a restricted state (Tart, 1975, 1986,
1994).

 I know from personal experience that there is a
transient and perhaps permanent 'awakening' from consensus
trance/consciousness, a clarification or lucidity, that is
rewarding and adaptive in itself, as well as vividly
illustrating the zombie-like qualities of ordinary
consciousness. Although it is hard to describe this condition
or state (it's more process than concrete state), for this
paper we will refer to it as the 'expanded consciousness
state'. The term Moody used, 'superconsciousness', is too
grandiose for the experiences I speak of from direct
knowledge. Such experiences also exist, but need not concern
us in this paper.

 People in this expanded consciousness state or
process seem indeed to understand each other fairly well,
even though what they communicate may sometimes seem
ineffable to those in ordinary, zombie-like consciousness.

Here I must make a vital point: the above three
observations are of quite limited value and possibly misleading
if one only thinks about them. But they can be understood and
verified through training and experience. Such experiential
understanding need not be limited to strange and unusual people,
such as the connotations of terms like 'mystics' bear.

To illustrate: In the early 1970s, I took a
number of classes on meditation from a Tibetan lama, Tarthang
Tulku, living in Berkeley. One of the practice instructions he
frequently referred to was to look for the 'space between
thoughts'. I found the concept of the space between thoughts
fascinating. For one thing, it was of great theoretical
significance if thoughts were discrete entities with a gap
between them, rather than continuous, as I had previously
experienced them. It also made sense that if one could find such
a space, it could produce a sort of liberation from the tyranny
that thoughts often produced as they captured one's attention. I
had many interesting and exciting thoughts during my attempts at
meditation about what this space between thoughts would be like
and its possibilities.

But I never experienced any gap or space
between my thoughts.

I have always tried to be as honest as possible
with myself, as well as with others, as both an essential part of
my scientific activity and as a guideline for living. Eventually
I had to admit to myself that I was fascinated by the concept
of a space between thoughts but that, for all practical purposes,
there was no observable space between my thoughts. While I
had fantasies about what such an experience would be like, I had
no real knowledge of it at all.

Expanded Consciousness State

Twenty years later I can report that I have now experienced
the space between thoughts many times, that I can often produce
and prolong that expanded consciousness state, to various
degrees, at will, and that from within that kind of
`spaciousness', it is clear that my ordinary consciousness, where
I live 99+% of my life, is indeed zombie-like. Yet in this state
of zombie consciousness, which is `normal' for our civilization,
I am generally considered an intelligent, articulate and
successful person. I am, in not quite the way I believe he
intended it, a living illustration of Moody's point about
zombies, viz. 'They engage in complex behaviours, very similar to
ours, but these behaviours are not accompanied by conscious
experience of any sort.' These behaviours can, unfortunately,
include talking and writing about 'awakening' and 'higher
consciousness', i.e. actually being in this more conscious state
is a quite distinct thing from conceptualizing about it. That is,
it is easier to have fantasies about being in a state of expanded
consciousness rather than actually living it.

To be more precise, I am ordinarily conscious
in consensus trance by normal, social standards of consciousness:
internal experiences accompany most of my behaviour, often
including the intellectual knowledge that I am having specific
sorts of experienceswhat we usually call
self-consciousness. I think, I plan, I remember, I experience
sensations, I experience pleasure and pain, hope and fear. So I
am not a zombie in Moody's particular use of the term. But from
the perspective of the (usually fleeting but sometimes longer)
state of the gap between thoughts, of 'awakening' in Gurdjieff's
sense (Ouspensky, 1949; Tart, 1986, 1994), my ordinary state of
consciousness is zombie-like in the general pejorative sense of
the term. These zombie qualities include: (a) a greatly reduced
sense of aliveness and vitality; (b) a great narrowing of
perspective and perception; (c) a consuming psychological
identification with some small subset of my full potential; (d)
reduced intelligence stemming from this narrow perspective and
identification; and (e) a selfishness, a self-centredness as
compared to a more open and compassionate attention to the rest
of reality.

The Dream Analogy

To try to further communicate some of the differences between
the more 'awakened' state and ordinary consciousness, let me use
the traditional analogy drawn in Eastern enlightenment traditions
between nocturnal dreaming and ordinary waking.

During a dream, we almost always take what is
happening as real. We are a real self having experiences within a
real world. When the dream situation is pleasant, fine, when it
is unpleasant, we suffer. When we wake up to ordinary waking
consciousness, however, we realize that the dream state was a
quite inferior state of consciousness in that (a) we did not know
our true condition, viz. dreaming; (b) we were not our usual
`real' self; (c) capacities we take for granted in the waking
state, such as ability to reason and draw up relevant memories
and skills were absent or distorted; and (d) our dream suffering
and problems were pseudo-suffering and pseudo-problems, and were
cured not on their own terms but by waking up to our real
identity and situation in the waking world.

Similarly, in moments or periods of that 'space
between thoughts' or expanded consciousness, I feel that I have
been unconscious (a) of my true condition (lost in the limited)
and of (b) my real identity (a non-verbalizable, non-concrete
sense of openness and process, rather than thingness); (c)
deprived of a clear perception and straightforward responsiveness
to the world; and (d) often suffering over 'problems' that were
not real, that only existed by virtue of my constricted mental
condition.

Observational Status of these Points

I shall make no attempt to argue or reason in support of the
above statements. Part of the understanding I have come to in my
three decades of research on consciousness is that reasoning and
logic (following rules, given a priori assumptions), while very
useful in a multitude of ways, are only a part of the
totality of conscious functioning and this part cannot reduce the
whole of consciousness to its terms. So, in the spirit of
science, the above are offered as observations that the reader
can potentially validate for herself if she is interested in
doing so. Space limitations here do not allow discussions of
methods, but the literature of the slowly growing field of
transpersonal psychology has many such discussions, as does the
traditional mystical literature. The methods that have worked
well for me are described in two books (Tart, 1986, 1994). I have
also found these methods for enhancing mindfulness in everyday
life quite teachable to selected graduate students. Excellent
introductions to mindfulness meditation, an important aspect of
method, are (Goldstein, 1987, 1994; Goldstein & Kornfield,
1987; Kabat-Zinn, 1990; 1994; Kornfield, 1993; LeShan, 1975;
Salzberg, 1995).

Will our Study of Consciousness go beyond ConsciousnessZ?

In his final paragraph, Moody speculates:

Consider the possibility that a few zombies might discover
a discipline that, after considerable practice, turns them
into non-zombies like us. It would presumably be difficult to
convince other zombies that such a discipline has any point,
and it would be quite easy for the zombies to dismiss the
phenomenon as marginal or pathological. The zombie scenario
does not prove the `validity' of mystical experience,
whatever that might mean, but it does entail that such
experience cannot be dismissed on the grounds of its radical
unfamiliarity to the rest of us. We might, after all, be
zombies. (p. 200.)

The interested reader is invited to experiment
with 'awakening', with finding the spaciousness between thoughts
(not to be confused with a suppression of thought or simple
blankness) that gives a much wider scope to our understanding of
consciousness. I believe everyone has had at least fleeting
moments of expanded consciousness, even if largely forgotten in
the hectic rush of zombie lifeZ, and this commentary
is to remind you of them and their importance. If we do not
develop this wider perspective, we shall, in Moody's terms, just
have our zombie science of consciousnessZ, thoughtZ,
feelingZ, hopeZ, fearZ, lifeZ
and deathZ. Speaking from my occasional experiences of
expanded consciousness, that would be sad indeed.